> No, you are hyper-focusing on that strawman
Others I've talked to have hyper-focused on that strawman. It isn't Linus I'm necessarily mad at, its his legion of fanboys who make crappy arguments based off of Linus's words.
Its not just the AVX512 example: people copy/paste his opinion on C++, Geekbench, and a whole slew of other issues constantly. Linus's arguments become memes throughout Reddit and are echo'd without analysis.
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But that's what happens when you put an "Expert" on a pedestal. People take their words, meme them out into new arguments, and then they don't necessarily apply anymore in the new situations.
That's my experience with "experts". The expert themselves are real, but the words they say can become warped through discussion to the point where they're meaningless.
For example, I think very few people would agree with: “And then suddenly he [Linus] talks about AVX512 and I wonder if he knows anything about low-level programming or optimization.”
And “But Linus is talking about power-budget”. No, you are hyper-focusing on that strawman, but his argument stands without that point. He is making a broader point based on his experience of Intel extensions over many years and he specifically alludes to that. He is saying he believes that AVX512 doesn’t add enough benefit for the costs.
You say “Linus is pretty much saying that Deep Learning / Tensorflow / etc. etc. isn't important.” but he says “I'd much rather see that transistor budget used on other things that are much more relevant. Even if it's still FP math (in the GPU, rather than AVX512)”.
You are the leaf on every comment on this thread, which is usually a bad sign of arguing a point regardless of the validity of what others say. As I read it, your arguments seem to argue about anything except for the core thesis of what Linus wrote, or you misrepresent his argument IMHO.
Edit: also, Linus is stating his opinion, an opinion which written loosely enough that you as an expert clearly can’t actually pin down as “wrong”. To make your point about the article, you would perhaps be better looking for a different example.